Has the Axe FX replaced your entire pedal board, or some/none of it?

Fleece

Fleece

Member
When I first unboxed my AxeFX, I put my pedal board to the side, with a vague understanding that I may never need it again.

But a month later, I started to miss some of my higher-end pedals, so I find myself using the full board again.

Admittedly, I haven't spent a sufficient amount of time trying to find/tweak on-board substitions for my pedals, but it makes intuitive sense to me that an Axe will not be able to compete with dedicated hardware effects from Strymon/Eventide/Analogman.

So I thought I'd first check in with you guys to see what your experiences have been.
 
Well my previous rig was based around the G-System which I used happily for a few years. It's been sold and the handful of pedals are gathering dust.
My carry in and set up is easy. Footprint is smaller. No micing up etc.
I may have felt different if I'd moved from a big pedal board but honestly I could not be happier with my tones and the flexibility I now have.
 
I am still waiting for the Ax8. I hope, I will not need any extra pedals. However, pedals have always been spice to my sound, and spice comes very much down to taste. I have spent years finding the perfect pedals for my taste, so I doubt whether, I will be able to / want to discard all the pedals and replace them with Axe's built-in effects, no matter how good they may be.
 
Not only did the Axe-Fx replace my entire pedalboard (years before I worked for Fractal) but I sold 98% of the pedals afterwards. Two of the pedal makers you name use DSP for their effects. In my opinion, any DSP effect can be emulated 100% (or better) -- though a particular pedal or effect may represent work that has not been done on the Axe-Fx yet. In fact what I kept were a few vintage FUZZ pedals and a favorite vintage compressor. (Plus the Morley phaser I bought at a garage sale in 1982 :)

That said, I do believe in pedals du jour, and I love how well they work with my Axe-Fx and AX8. I almost never place hardware pedals in the FX loop, preferring to keep them in front of the amp.
 
Fleece said:
an Axe will not be able to compete with dedicated hardware effects from Strymon/Eventide/Analogman.
Click to expand...

My opinion is that you are wrong here, the axe is definitely in the same league and can go beyond many of those because of routing, controllers etc... the problem is those units have nice presets to show off their abilities, but with the axe you need the "know how"
 
From time to time I give some pedals a try again. It's always fun to do that, I like to have some special guests in my setup when practising and I like to turn knobs and being able to turn an effect on/off by foot without thinking about midi commands and thinds like that. But there is no need for me to take any pedal to a gig. It's enough inside the axe-fx, not everything, but by far enough.
So these stomp boxes are lying around in my music room.
 
NeoSound said:
My opinion is that you are wrong here, the axe is definitely in the same league and can go beyond many of those because of routing, controllers etc... the problem is those units have nice presets to show off their abilities, but with the axe you need the "know how"
Click to expand...

That's exactly the thing. Even if I could get the Axe's reverb to be as good as Strymon's BigSky (which is a fairly tall order), it's nice having easy access to parameters through a dedicated box with knobs. And I control my Eventide H9 with my iPad, which is awfully nice (and something I really wish the AxeFX had implemented).
 
My Axe-FX plus MFC has completely replaced my pedals and pedalboard. My previous setup was based around a G-System with some specialised pedals.

I have yet to sell them on; not because I have any intention of going back to them, just that I am so very, very lazy ;)
 
Replaced my G system and pedals and Eventide Eclipse set-up, then got replaced by pedals, then replaced those pedals, currently playing nice along side pedals.
 
I often use two pedals in front of the Axe FX -- a Cry Baby mini wah and a Dunlop pickup boost. With the new FAS boost pedal, I may drop the pickup booster. Although I sometimes use the Axe wahs, I feel like the Cry Baby has a more pronounced and organic effect.
 
Yes it has, at least well enough to where I'm not longer looking for pedals anymore (bad addiction for years lol)

This isn't to say the Axe is perfect at everything, but its good enough to where when I'd go out and buy/rebuy a dedicated pedal, it didn't really seem to warrant the cost and hassle patching it into a loop.

Caitlinbread Echorec for example.....awesome pedal for what it did, and a little better than what I can get out of the Axe....BUT..... was it $230 better for an effect I really don't use that much ? Not really...... and again it meant having to patch it into my chain, having to worry about knob settings which don't magically change per patch like the effects on the Axe etc.

In the end the Axe just proves to always be "good enough", and also a huge time/money saver.

Are the Axe fuzz sounds perfect ? Again nope, but the number of hours, and losses I had buying/trying/selling all the hot at the moment fuzzes from Skreddy, Wren and Cuff etc really added up fast. I'd end up losing hundreds of dollars in a month doing this, thinking every next pedal would be "the one".

With the Axe I've just learned to accept it does what it does well enough, and to stop looking/reading/buying TGP forums and such.

Maybe if I had unlimited funds I'd still have a huge pedal collection, wouldn't we all lol, but I'd probably still have just an Axe rig set up and always ready to play.....

Back when I had a collection of 30-40 pedals I could almost never even play them because nothing was patched together or dialed in. I'd spend 45 minutes picking which pedals I wanted, a/b'ing them against another pedal I was thinking of selling etc.

So many choices took time away from actually playing (but was fun in its own way.....)

Long story short.... There aren't any tones that Axe can't get me well enough for my needs. Now sure it can't do everything, so no it won't replace, say a EHX C9 pedal that well, but that frankly isn't an effect I need for my music so its not missed.

In terms of delays, chorus, reverbs, amp sims, boost, OD's, wah, phaser etc. Axe handles it all nicely, and really anything lacking comes down to my playing ability.

Lets face it, there are dudes with some generic Boss pedals that just kill on guitar, like Prince, and then there are guys on forums with $10K worth of pedal board gear and sound like crap and can't play a lick really. They just have the money to buy fancy/rare gear on Ebay.

Bottom line for me these days is that as long as I can do my part as a player, the Axe is going to be able to produce world class sounds and I shouldn't ever need anything more
 
The only pedals I own that I can't replicate are vintage fuzz, vintage wah, vintage flanger and digitech whammy.

I still have my pedal collection and use it when I need to run a conventional rig. I am always reminded of the low noise floor in the Fractal every time I plug my pedal board in. Wow. The Fractal is incredible.

The somewhat recent re-do of the reverb, and the more recent BBD, "analog", versions of the delay and chorus completely eliminated me using conventional pedals for those. The models in the box are just better. They sound warm. Have no noise issues. And the clarity is much better than my real pedals.
 
I kept some fuzz pedals. Most of them were homemade replicas. And some pedals a friend gave me from his company. But I don't really use them. They're in a flight case in the garage getting dusty. Or they're on a little board I built that the bass player in my band uses.

I agree with @Admin M@: anything I owned with a dsp in it I was able to emulate in the magic box. The latest and last was the Boss RV-5 which was a snap to mimic and was promptly sold after I did.
 
I still have a small, fun pedalboard. Perfect for practice and with just a handful of basic pedals is not unmanageable at all.
Also, I'm waiting to get an AX8! Don't think I'll get rid of anything, except GAS
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Fleece said:
When I first unboxed my AxeFX, I put my pedal board to the side, with a vague understanding that I may never need it again.

But a month later, I started to miss some of my higher-end pedals, so I find myself using the full board again.

Admittedly, I haven't spent a sufficient amount of time trying to find/tweak on-board substitions for my pedals, but it makes intuitive sense to me that an Axe will not be able to compete with dedicated hardware effects from Strymon/Eventide/Analogman.

So I thought I'd first check in with you guys to see what your experiences have been.
Click to expand...
I dunno about the competing thing...but what I do know is this when I was getting a ready to go out with Fierabracci last Winter (and he played with every one) we did some Fierabracchi/Garsed/Donati stuff along with my material and in the first rehearsal which was Axe2 MFC and single Rector cab all he had to say and I quote...fuck this set-up is like instant Landau, not that this is what I went for, jus' saying...
 
The only pedal I have used since getting my Axe 2 is my EHX HOG 2. I still have all my pedals and pedal board because I don't need to sell them and they are all in great condition, but I literally haven't powered any of them up in over 2 years. Even in situations where I would have used the HOG 2 in the past I try to figure out a way to do it using the pitch block, because I'm addicted to a simple setup of guitar, Axe 2, foot controller, and powered monitor.
 
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